Week 10

           This week’s Brown (2012) chapter 13 covered career development in postsecondary educational institutions.  I would like to start by discussing about an important topic that was discussed in the beginning of the chapter, which was the topic of underemployment.  There are different definitions of underemployment which was stated in Brown (2012) led to an inadequate measure of the underemployment in the U.S. by the Gallup Organization’s survey.  The Gallup Organization only included those working part-time and wanted to be working full-time, which as pointed out in Brown (2012) does not include workers who are in jobs, either full-time or part-time that do not allow them to use the skills and knowledge gained in their education (Brown, p. 292, 2012).  I think that especially recently there are many college graduates that are in jobs where they feel underemployed.  I think that many recent college graduates are in jobs where they are not using their skill set that they went to college to acquire and are not in meaningful jobs where they are reaching satisfaction, satisfactoriness, and tenure.  I am in a job where I think I am using some of my skill set that I acquired from my undergraduate educational experience.  I know that the job I have now is not one that I would want to the rest of my life and that is why I am pursing a graduate degree.  I also think that I am helping children and society’s future and not making what I think I should be for the amount of work, change, and help I am providing to others. 

           I thought that the next point brought up in Brown (2012) was interesting that there is an influx of older-than-average students into postsecondary institutions.  Also the diversity of college students increasingly reflects the diversity of our society.  I went to a liberal arts college and there were several non-traditional students of older-than-average students that attend our campus for an undergraduate degree.  I think that now in graduate school it is more socially excepted to have older students because they already have a bachelor’s degree and there are students of all ages in graduate school and pursuing doctorates.  I think that students who are older-than-average are being more socially accepted in universities because in today’s economy there is more of a demand and need for more workers so that if they have families they can support them.  Most people believe that a college degree will help them get a better job and earn more money.

            I briefly want to touch on the Granello (2001) article about writing at a higher level.  I though that is was interesting to read about the different levels that a student can be writing in and not realize that they are suck at a level because they are just simply restating the information they gathered rather than organizing researched information into logical categories and making the cumulative information fit together for fluently.  I think that it is a learning process that needs to be further developed by many students.

References

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed). New

  York : Pearson Education, Inc.

Granello, D. H. (2001). Promoting cognitive complexity in graduate written work:  Using Bloom’s 

           taxonomy as a pedagogical tool to improve literature reviews.  Counselor Education and  

           Supervision, 40,  292-307.